There are many common dental instruments used for removing carious dentin from teeth. Typically, however, unless the operator senses when a harder material is encountered and immediately ceases drilling, prior art burs will continue to cut into normal dentin during and after removal of the carious dentin. Because of the difficulty in sensing precisely when harder material is encountered, the side effect of using such a bur is some cutting of normal healthy dentin. In addition, this produces an infected and clogged bur that is relatively expensive to discard and difficult to sterilize.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a dental cutting tool capable of selectively differentiating between harder and softer material, substantially irrespective of operator control.